Introduction

Medieval Eastern Orthodox calendars of saints are extremely diverse in
their commemorations for most calendar days of the year because
the Eastern Orthodox Church had no canonization or beatification
process. Thus local monasteries and priests were free to assign
saints, including locally venerated saints, to whichever
calendar date they deemed appropriate. The lack of consistency
among calendars, the sheer number of calendars, and the fact
that most medieval Slavic calendars of saints are unpublished
have made it notoriously difficult to access and organize the
data from such a large corpus, and to identify many of the
saints who appear in calendars on more minor feast days. It is
for this reason that a typology of medieval Slavic calendar
traditions has not yet been developed.

The free-use database and search program at this site are intended to
ameliorate this situation by providing a large corpus of
medieval Slavic and Greek calendars of saints that can be
searched according to specific attributes of the manuscripts
themselves and the commemorations they contain. The goal is to
provide scholars with a large but manageable corpus of data for
comparative study of calendar traditions, determination of the
relationships between and among calendars, and analysis of any
individual calendar.

The files in the corpus consist of the saints entries, or commemorations,
from medieval calendars; that is, they do not contain the entire
calendar text, pericope listings, services, or other liturgical
instructions. Where the original text of a calendars saints
entries is available, it has been included in the file. The
Church Slavonic and Greek texts are transcribed in Unicode Old
Cyrillic and polyphonic Greek fonts so that they are readable on
the Internet.

The electronic calendar collation is a long-term project, and the corpus
of calendars and search program are only in their beginning
stage. At present the on-line corpus contains only a small
number of the over 700 medieval Slavic and Greek calendars that
I hope to include in it eventually. Among the calendars still to
be added are over 120 manuscripts that I copied saints’ entries
from by hand in archives in Bulgaria, Russia, and England;
manuscripts from microfilm collections at the Hilandar Research
Library at The Ohio State University, the Bulgarian Academy of
Sciences Central Library, and the manuscript division of the
Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia; and medieval
Roman martyrologies. A long-term goal is the inclusion of
calendars of saints from the Coptic, Syrian, Georgian, Armenian,
and other traditions.

All users are invited to contribute to the on-line corpus other medieval
Eastern Orthodox calendars, from any tradition. If you would
like to participate in this project, please contact Professor
Cynthia Vakareliyska at the Department of Linguistics,
University of Oregon (vakarel@uoregon.edu) to receive instructions on
how to text-encode the calendars.

If you find any typographical errors or errors in the identification of
saints in the files, or if you can identify any saints in the
files that I have not yet been able to identify, please contact
me at vakarel@uoregon.edu.

Search program and text-encoding

The schema for the calendar files and the search program were created by
Professor David J. Birnbaum, chair of the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. The
calendars have been text-encoded using the <oXygen/> XML
editing and development program.

Instructions for Searches

Searches of the on-line corpus of calendars can be conducted according to
the following attributes of the manuscripts containing the
calendars and the individual saints entries in them:

manuscript genre

century

date, if known

title, if the manuscript is known by one

signature number (shelfmark)

repository

manuscript country of provenance

Any two or more calendars in the corpus can be searched together for
shared entries. The search program will bring up all matching
entries and will indicate the percentage of entries in the
calendars that correspond.

Searches by manuscript genre

The corpus can be searched according to the following genres of
manuscripts in which the calendars are found: tetraevangelia,
long lectionary gospels, short lectionary gospels, lectionary
apostoli (Acts and Epistles), narrative apostoli, lectionary
gospel/apostoli, menaia, festal menaia, prologues, verse
prologues, typika, martyrologies, and manuscripts of unknown
genre.

Searches by manuscript provenance

The manuscript country of provenance is determined primarily by
orthographic features, if the manuscript does not contain a
colophon stating the location where it was written. The term
“Bulgarian” for country of provenance includes manuscripts with
Macedonian orthographic features, because there was no separate
Macedonian state at during the period when the manuscripts in
the corpus were written. In cases where a given manuscript can
clearly be identified as Macedonian from its orthographic
features, a note is included in the manuscript description
indicating that the manuscript has Macedonian features.

Saints’ entry search features

Saints’ entries can be searched according to the following features:

sex (male, female, mixed, unknown)

event

archaic (for entries from the Synaxarion to the archaic
Constantinople Typikon that are not preserved in the
Menology of Emperor Basil to the second edition of
the Constantinople Typikon)

nationality (Slavic, Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian, Latin, or
general)

calendar date

generic saints name

string from the Fully Qualified Name of the saints entry
(see below)

Note that the general term saints’ entry, or entry, as
used in this manual, includes entries for events, since most
events celebrated in calendars in the corpus are associated with
specific saints.

Searches by sex

Any given manuscript or manuscripts in the corpus can be searched for
female or male saints. There are four search features for
biological sex: male, female, mixed, and unknown. The feature
mixed applies to groups of two or more saints who are frequently
celebrated together, or saint sets, that include both male and
female members. The other three attributes apply both to
individual saints and saint sets.

Searches by nationality

The search attribute nationality means not the nationality of
the given saint, but the particular national tradition that the
saint’s entry is associated with. The default nationality,
general, covers saints’ entries that are part of the general
Eastern Orthodox tradition or the Greek tradition in particular.
Included in this category are the early saints of any
nationality that were celebrated in Byzantine Greek calendars.
The attribute Latin refers to saints from the Western tradition
who are not traditionally found in Eastern Orthodox calendars
and are not found in the earliest Jerusalem or Constantinople
traditions.

The other nationality attributes are Slavic, Serbian, Russian, and
Bulgarian. The Slavic attribute is used at this point primarily
for SS. Cyril and Methodius, who appear frequently in early
extant Slavic Eastern Orthodox calendars of all national
provenances. The attribute “Serbian” is self-explanatory. The
terms “Russian” and “Bulgarian” are abbreviated generic terms.
“Russian” covers any East Slavic tradition. “Bulgarian” refers
to Bulgarian and/or Macedonian traditions. The term “Bulgarian"
rather than “Macedonian” is used are the generic term for both
traditions because during the historical period when the
medieval Slavic calendars were written there was no separate
Macedonian state or territory outside the Bulgarian Empire. No
attempt has been made in the search program or corpus to
determine which saints in this category are Macedonian and which
are Bulgarian.

Searches by calendar date

A search by a given calendar date will provide all the entries found in
the corpus for that date, together with the codes for the
calendars. A search by date can be narrowed to a specific
calendar or calendars in the corpus.

Each calendar entry is listed by entryDate and
realDate. The entry date is the day of the year to
which a saint’s entry is assigned in the given calendar. In some
instances, a scribe has inadvertently skipped a day or repeated
a day, so that the entry date does not correspond to the
intended calendar date. In these instances, the entry date will
differ from the real date, which is the intended date.
Discrepancies between an entry date and the real date are tagged
in the files only when it is clear from the manuscript that the
numbering error is recent and unintentional. Otherwise, if it is
not obvious from the manuscript that the misnumbering occurred
first in the manuscript itself, I have not assigned to a
different real date any entries in a given calendar that are
listed for a different day from the majority date, even when the
date of the entry differs from the usual date by a single day.
The reason for this is that there are many instances in which an
inadvertent date-assignment error has been transmitted through
generations of apographs, becoming in the process a legitimate
calendar tradition.

Searches by value archaic

The value archaic: yes indicates that the entry from a given
manuscript is a rare and archaic entry that is found for the
same day in the menology to the first edition of the
Constantinople Typikon (file CT in the corpus), from the late
ninth or early tenth century, but not in the tenth-century
second revised edition (the Menologium of Emperor Basil, file
Bas). Entries from the first edition of the Constantinople
Typikon that are also found in the second edition for the same
date are not marked archaic: yes, but instead fall
under the default value archaic: no. Note that the
feature archaic is limited to the Constantinople
Typikon tradition and does not include archaic entries from
other traditions. It also does not necessarily refer to the
earliest saints from a historical perspective.

Searches by name

Two types of searches of saints’ entries by name can be conducted:
searches by generic name and by fully qualified name (FQN). Each
saint’s entry is tagged for both a generic name (for example,
Mary or John), and for a FQN, which includes the full name or
descriptive features by which the saint or event is known: for
example, “Mary, sister of Lazarus” or “John the Baptist”.

Linked to this page is the Tag Name List,
which gives in alphabetical order the official generic names
that are used in this corpus and search program, together with
the FQN variants of each generic name. The FQNs for each generic
name occur in rough calendar date order (the church year
beginning on September 1).

If you wish to search the corpus by a specific calendar date and name
together, it usually will be easier to search by generic name.
It is particularly important to look beyond FQNs to generic
names for a given date, because some calendars in the corpus may
misidentify the saint you are looking for, giving a different
FQN. If you search by calendar date and FQN, these misidentified
saints will not be brought up.

Alternatively, the corpus can be searched by a string from an FQN. Some
of the FQNs are by necessity quite long, in order to
differentiate one saint from another with the same generic name.
However, the entire FQN need not be typed out in order to
conduct a search of a calendar or calendars, or of the entire
corpus, by FQN. Searches by FQN can be made on the basis of a
string from an FQN: the first few words of
the FQN that contain the more precise name of the saint, or a
sequence of words from elsewhere in the FQN. If you are looking
for a particular individual, group of individuals, or event, it
generally is best to type in a string from the beginning of the
FQN. It is also possible, however, to search on the basis of a
phrase from the FQN such as “Nicomedia”, since the search
program will pick up any part of the FQN. However, if you do
search the corpus or individual calendars by toponym such as
Nicomedia, the search program will produce only those martyrs at
Nicomedia who are identified as such in their FQNs in the Tag
Name List. It will not bring up any other martyrs in the corpus
who were martyred at Nicomedia. Note also that although a string
search will bring up all those FQNs that include Nicomedia, this
does not mean that the calendars text necessarily includes the
word Nicomedia in that entry.

The search program is not case-sensitive, but otherwise generic names and
strings from FQNs must be typed exactly as they appear in
the Tag List. Typographical errors can be
avoided by copying a FQN or a string from a FQN from the Tag
List into the box for your search query. The FQN itself appears
in the Tag Name List in italics. Any unitalicized text
following an FQN is supplemental distinguishing information and
not part of the FQN. The conventions used in creating the FQNs
in the Tag Name List are explained below.

Searches by saint set

If you are searching for a saint set, i.e., two or more saints that are
celebrated together, the quickest way to find these is by
generic name of the saint set as listed in the Tag Name List. In
some cases, the decision whether to include individual saints
together as a saintSet in the corpus has been somewhat
subjective, based both on the frequency of joint or multiple
saints’ entries in the corpus and on descriptions of the saints
in Holwecks Biographical Dictionary of Saints. Some
individual saints that are members of a saintSet may not be
listed in the Tag Name list under the saintSet name. In such
cases, search instead for that saint individually by FQN.

Other searches

We plan to expand the search program in the future to include the
following types of searches of the actual text of the calendars
in the corpus: by specific lexical variant, by Graecisms on the
lexical and orthographic levels, by significant orthographic
variants, and by morphological or morphosyntactic variant. For
now, Graecisms and interesting lexical and orthographic variants
in the texts of the entries in individual Slavic calendars are
marked in footnotes. We also plan eventually for the program to
allow searches on the basis of whether a saints entry in a given
calendar includes a service and/or a pericope.

Conventions used in the collation

Orthography

The orthographic features of the Old Cyrillic texts of saints’ entries,
including the original diacritical marks and graphemes,
generally have been preserved, so as to allow the user to
distinguish between individual calendars more easily, with the
following simplifications:

no distinction has been made in the reproduction of various
shapes of ornamental broad o’s

Old Cyrillic “cursive” m’s and t’s have not been
reproduced

paerki are reproduced with the paerok
grapheme even if the manuscript uses a smooth or
rough breathing mark to represent a paerok;
otherwise, breathing marks and accent marks are
reproduced as in the manuscript

where a manuscript appears randomly to use both apostrophes
and dots to mark vowel letters, these are all
reproduced as dots

the underscore symbol in square brackets [_] indicates an
illegible or erased letter; a double underscore [__]
indicates two such letters, etc.

ligatures consisting of two or more graphemes are surrounded
by parentheses: ().

In cases where both the original manuscript and the manuscript edition
have been consulted, the original manuscript is relied on where
there are known discrepancies with the edition. The
transcription of original or photographed/microfilmed manuscript
text is conservative, in the sense that any graphemes that were
not legible to me are not reproduced. This is the case even
where a manuscript edition transcribes graphemes that were not
legible to me in my examination of the original manuscript.

Notes

In a note following a saint’s entry, “probably” or “likely” refers to the
degree of likelihood, in my opinion, that the FQN given is the
correct identity of the saint. Notes to the Church Slavonic text
of a saint’s entry in any given Slavic manuscript point out
orthographic, lexical, and other peculiarities of the text and
any relevant textual, lexical, or orthographic comparisons to
the text of the same entry in other calendars. We intend
eventually to make these features searchable.

English variants of Fully Qualified Names (FQN)

The FQNs (Fully Qualified Names) for individual commemorations are based
on the English name variants and descriptions in Holweck’s
Biographical Dictionary of the Saints.
I have used Holweck’s source even though his descriptions and
honorifics for individual saints reflect the Roman Catholic, not
Eastern Orthodox, tradition, because the name variants and
descriptions in the Biographical Dictionary are
more familiar to native English speakers: e.g., Mary, the mother
of Jesus, is listed in the collation as the Virgin Mary, not the
Mother of God or Theotokos, and, as is characteristic of the
Western Christian tradition, followers of the Apostles are
referred to as disciples rather than apostles. The use of
Holweck’s name and description variants is not, however, an
endorsement of the Roman Catholic tradition over the Eastern
Orthodox tradition. Holweck oscillates in his use of the English
vs. Latin, and sometimes Greek, name variants: e.g., Leo vs.
Leontius, Mark vs. Marcus. For the most part I have not
attempted to normalize or standardize Holweck’s variants, but
instead I have usually preserved the variants he gives. For some
saints, Holweck gives two or more alternate name variants (e.g.,
Marcus/Mark or Agnes/Mary). In such instances, the collation
lists all the variants that Holweck lists for a given
individual’s name.